Building the GlotPress Translation Manager

Many of you probably know @isaackeyet from his contributions to translate.wordpress.org as well as work on the WordPress mobile apps. Well, he’s back again to contribute some new designs to the GlotPress plugin.

As part of the design process, Isaac wants to hear from translators and validators alike. What makes a translation interface good? Every person that reads this post (you!) can participate. You don’t have to be a designer!

It only takes five minutes to help. Here’s how:

Use whatever medium you’d like (paper, pen, computer).

Sketch out your ideal translation interface. Try not to think about specific features. You don’t need to be an artist. Rough sketches are helpful too!

Post your picture as a comment here.

That’s it! Lots of contributions mean lots of inspiration as Isaac designs the future of GlotPress.

At the GlotPress weekly chat last week (September 24), a large number of attendees were interested in developing GlotPress as a WordPress plugin. There are certain advantages to this direction, including the availability of tens of thousands of WordPress plugins and the ability to utilize many WordPress features instead of reinventing them. You can read the log of that meeting here (there was more follow up in today’s GlotPress meeting as well).

As a result of those discussions, a group from the community has formed a team to develop GlotPress-the-plugin on GitHub. Today, this team met and discussed a short roadmap to get the plugin ready for production on translate.wordpress.org, among other sites. Here’s a quick recap of some of the decisions that were made on the path toward 1.0:

In general, the goal is to keep GlotPress the same and only replace features if WordPress already includes them. Commits to GlotPress core (SVN) will be merged into the plugin as-needed.

GlotPress-the-plugin should live alongside WordPress instead of being a standalone application. This means a site could still use posts and pages, just like other WordPress installations. Of course, this behavior could easily be modified by a plugin.

For the initial version, the GlotPress administration tools will remain on the front end and not move to WP-Admin (#14).

GlotPress plugins will need to be converted to WordPress plugins; GlotPress-the-plugin will not provide backward compatibility for GlotPress plugins. However, scripts should be made to migrate installs, perhaps using wp-cli (#9).

It is recommended that WordPress plugins that support GlotPress-the-plugin use “gp” at the start of their slug and include the “glotpress” tag in the plugin directory.

For version 1.0, theming in GlotPress will remain the same. Integration with WordPress themes will happen later.

Version 1.0 of the plugin will also not include migration tools for users and usermeta tables. While there are certainly installations which utilize these GlotPress tables, a fair number use WordPress tables to manage their users. Migration tools will be added later (#6).

Code practices should follow the WordPress core best practices. However, just as core does, these standards only apply to new code or when modifying code; old code can remain as it is (see also).

For the foreseeable future, development of this plugin will take place on GitHub. You can view the 1.0 milestone for more information.

If you’re interested in this direction for GlotPress, get involved and help build the plugin or join us for the next GlotPress-the-plugin chat, next Thursday at 13:00 UTC, just after the GlotPress chat.